The title of your book is intriguing. Which is the country that is forgotten, Korea or the United States? Or is it a metaphor for what an immigrant has to leave behind?

The title worked in a few different ways that I liked. It refers to Korea—not only the Korea that the family in the book leaves behind, but the Korea that was lost when it was divided. In my book, I wanted the break between the sisters to be a kind of echo of that split—and for the family’s exile from their homeland (where they belonged, where they felt whole) to be an echo of the loss of that older Korea. On a metaphorical level, the title also refers to the sisters’ estrangement—so the forgotten country is their childhood closeness, their innocence and the past.

You have a degree in mathematics as well as creative writing. What effect, if any, does math have on your writing?

It’s funny: When I was a math major in college I wrote stories all the time, and now whenever I write, I’m always sneaking in some math. I love both disciplines because it seems to me that they’re both ultimately about learning how to make sense of the world, trying to organize the chaos and describe and communicate it in a meaningful and beautiful way.

Siblings play such an important role in your book. Do you have siblings, and what makes that relationship so special?

I have one older brother, and he’s the best. We shared toys and stuffed animals, and we wrote and made books together! The thing about being a younger sibling is that your older sibling is so much more important and large in your world than you are in theirs when you’re kids. Despite my best efforts to be just like him, we’re very different. Still, all the ways that we’re similar make me feel a sense of belonging that I don’t have with anyone else. He knows where I’m from, and he’s the only one in the world who’s from there too. So I feel lucky and happy to have him.

Janie discovers some secrets about an aunt that she thought had died in Korea. This is based on an incident in your own family—can you tell us about it?

I found out in college that my father had a sister I’d never known about, and that she had disappeared when he was a child. I still know almost nothing about what really happened. The North Koreans used to raid dorms and kidnap girls, and this is what my father’s family thought had happened to her, but they didn’t talk about it—at least not to us kids. I think my way of exploring that marked-off territory was to make up stories about the parts of it that interested me.

I love the way the folktales that are told in the novel reinforce some of its themes, such as obedience and sacrifice.

Thanks! Growing up, my parents told me so many stories, night after night—and I loved all of them: folktales, and fairy tales, legends and myths from all different cultures. They shaped my view of the world and my place in it, and they instilled certain expectations and values in me. I still love all those stories, and that’s part of why they’re in the book, but I also wanted to engage with them a little more and push back.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Forgotten Country.

In her debut novel—voted by BookPage readers as their most anticipated book of 2012—Nichole Bernier has written the story of a friendship full of twists, turns and heartache. We asked Bernier a few questions about the book's origin, her life as a mother of five, and her book's place in the literary canon—and got the scoop on where she's going next.

This is your first novel. Can you tell us a little about your publication story?
I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and though I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it. But after I lost a friend in the September 11th terrorist attacks, there were things I couldn’t work through in my regular ways of writing. One day in early 2005, shortly after the birth of my third child, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. That sequence became the beginning of chapter three, and it’s never changed.

My big rookie error was in querying immediately after I finished my first draft. My mental timeline was still that of a magazine freelancer: finish, publish, paycheck. I wasn’t used improving something slowly and tortuously with no one in the world even waiting for it. We’d just moved to Boston and I was expecting my fourth child, and eager to cross “Get Agent” off my to-do list. There were some requests for partials and fulls, all leading to rejection.

I put the manuscript aside and fell into the rhythm of life with a newborn, not quite knowing what to do next. A few months passed. Then I received a three-page, thoughtful rejection letter from a well-known agent. Even as a rookie, I recognized this as more of a blessing than a rejection, and threw myself into revisions. When I felt ready to query again, I received three offers of representation, and chose agent Julie Barer.

Julie worked with me for a year, urging me to streamline my story and weave more closely the timelines of my two main characters. After she sold it to Crown, the trajectory of the process suddenly made sense, all the steps and hard work, as if I were viewing it as a whole from a space satellite. 

It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close.         

Kate is responsible for deciding what to do with her recently deceased friend Elizabeth’s trunk of journals. How did this idea of bestowing journals (via a will) come to you?
I’ve always kept a journal, and been fascinated with why, exactly, people do this crazy thing, put private thoughts to paper. What happens if you’re hit by a truck tomorrow? Were you really writing for your own reflection and catharsis, or were you having your say? Years ago for peace of mind I wrote an informal note in my will designating a trustee for my journals, even if it simply meant identifying someone to destroy them.

The what-ifs that generated the novel spooled out from there: what if you inherited the journals of a friend without clear direction what to do with them, and learned you didn’t know your friend nearly as well as you thought, including where she was really going when she died? How might you feel about why she didn’t confide in you, and how might that make you realize ways you were not candid with loved ones, yourself? It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close, our private ambitions and fears, and what it costs us in the end.

Reading through Elizabeth’s journals, Kate suddenly sees their entire friendship in a different light. Would you read your best friend’s journal, if you had the chance?
No. People have their reasons for what they reveal and what they do not, and I would never want to force that exposure. But many people hold things closer than they in fact need to, assuming they’ll be misunderstood or that people don’t care to get involved. The most useful thing we can do as friends is listen for hints and dare to ask questions, help someone crack open the door. Signal receptiveness, and that we care.

Kate is terribly preoccupied with 9/11 and has a lot of fears/neuroses in its aftermath. Her husband doesn’t really understand this. Do you find yourself sympathizing with Kate, or are you more of the mindset of her husband Chris, who feels we should live each day as if it were our last?
In 2002, it felt as if anything could happen—reservoirs poisoned, Ebola unleashed, that you could wake up and the sky would be magenta. I think most people, myself included, felt for a while these things were not only possible, but probable. Most of us moved on from that paralyzing fear, but it was fascinating to me to create the profile of a person who was a confident and rational person, but became obsessed with protecting her family, and could not move on.

A big part of your novel concerns Elizabeth and Kate’s struggle as working mothers. As a mother of five, how do you manage both raising your kids and finding time to write?
Before I started my novel, my third child was six months old, and I was a fairly multifaceted person. When I became truly serious about my novel, most of my hobbies went down the tubes. It’s amazing how being a busy parent has the laser-like ability to triage what’s really important to you. I have an unscientific theory that if you are an involved parent, regardless of how many children you have, you get about three things to call your own. And the only other things that have remained for me are being involved in my kids’ schools and a base level of exercise, which went from running (reluctant, frenetic) to yoga (strengthening and calming). More than anything else, though, it was critical to have a supportive spouse who’d give me the hours and sometimes days away to really immerse myself in tough sections of writing and revision.

You write on your website, “before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear.” Do you find yourself tailoring your thoughts/emotions when you write somewhere like Twitter, since it’s so much more exposed?
Yes and no. Social media is wonderful in the same triage way that parenting is: it forces you to pick what you want to be known for. In the same way I wouldn’t want to say anything in front of my family that wasn’t sincere or kind, I don’t want that part of my permanent online record. But for social media to be fun and effective for me, I need to be authentic, and sometimes that means being exhausted and irreverent about raising five children. But everyone deals with unruly kids, so even in “authentic” I aim for a value-added, something to lift it above a mundane rant: humor, insight, a different way of seeing things.

One of my favorite parts of the book reads, “it was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person—that was an art.” Do you think it’s fully possible to share solitude with another person? How do you manage the time to find—and create—that?
That’s the million-dollar question for relationships, I think. If you can be quiet in another person’s company and engaged in your own engrossing activity, with no discomfort or distraction or envy, it’s priceless. But it’s hard. There’s a lot of bustle that has to get done in the downtimes, and even when you go quiet, there are some things that are just difficult to do in the presence of someone else. I can’t write in a room where the TV is on, which is how my husband likes to work at night, but sometimes I join him to do other reading and computer work. I think it’s a matter of finding the common ground, the common setting, choosing where and when you can find that togetherness.

You have already been compared to other successful authors in the “educated women’s lit” group, such as J. Courtney Sullivan and Meg Wolitzer. How would you define educated women’s literature?
I think that phrase first came out of Carolyn See’s review of Nancy Munro’s New World Monkeys. I took it to mean readers who want to be challenged by what they read, be willing to go along with characters who might rub you the wrong way, but you still find them, their voice and their issues and circumstances, fascinating. Unlikeable characters are a hot button in the book world because for some they are riveting, drawn in a train-wreck way that grabs your investment, while others are turned off if they cannot identify with a character. It’s a bit of an excursion and an education, reading beyond your own experience and beyond your comfort zone.

You are one of the creators of the popular literary blog Beyond the Margins. Can you tell us a little about how that came about?

This has been such fun. We were a dozen writers who’d met in the literary circles around Boston, and two years ago decided to create a vehicle for daily essays on the craft and business of publishing. It started as a platform for our writing, as many of us were in the chute toward getting agents and novels sold. But it developed into an online literary magazine run amok—a place to showcase the writing of great guest authors, celebrate and promote other authors’ releases, and yes, interact with agents and editors.

We run fun monthly features such as The Page Turner—booksellers writing about their favorite lesser-known books—and Out Of My Comfort Zone, authors describing a recent bit of research or writing that made them distinctly uneasy. Save the Bookstore Day is a monthly feature that grew out of our passion and fear for independent bookstores, which seem to be dropping like flies. We also maintain an active Twitter feed, @BTMargins, to share news, essays and jobs in the writing world.

What are you working on next?
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with an eerie island, a fascinating and disturbing place that spans three distinct phases of history. The ruins are vivid, and haunting. It’s off-limits to the public, but I had the good fortune to spend a day there shadowing the Park Service. I’m at the point now where I’m fleshing out the story, and trying not to let the nightmares keep me awake at night.

Read our review of The Unfinished Life of Elizabeth D.

Who among us hasn’t wished for more hours in a day? In Karen Thompson Walker’s exciting debut novel, The Age of Miracles, we get exactly that—with dire consequences.

Eleven-year-old Julia is going about the business of growing up in suburban San Diego—piano lessons, sleepovers, a cute skater boy—when the inexplicable occurs: The earth begins to slow on its axis. Days stretch out, growing first by a few minutes, then by hours. Clocks become absurd, gravity goes wonky, the sun becomes a menace, the long nights are cold and terrifying. Society must decide whether to follow “clock time” (the government’s choice) or real time (the anarchic, countercultural approach). Kids wait for the school bus in pitch-dark; people hang blackout curtains to sleep through the bright sun of night. No one knows how long the slowing might last or if it will get worse. Suddenly, adolescence is the least of Julia’s worries.

Speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, Walker says the idea for The Age of Miracles came from a newspaper article about the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. The earthquake that preceded the tsunami was so powerful it affected the speed of the earth on its axis, shortening the length of a day by fractions of a second. “I just found that very haunting,” Walker says. “Something we think of as stable and steady—sunset and sunrise.”

She immediately wrote a short story inspired by the notion. Years later she went back to the story and felt there was more to say. She also made a crucial change: to slow the earth, rather than speed it up. A grown-up Julia tells the story, looking back on the profound and rapid changes that happened to the world as she grew up. The result is an enthralling novel with multiple layers of tension between the pace of life and the pace of the story.

To adolescents, it can seem as if the world is moving at a glacial pace, that adulthood and its freedoms are endlessly far away. For Julia, this is literally true. Her days are twice as long as they should be. Nevertheless, she’s still in most ways an ordinary (confused, alienated, hopeful) adolescent, beset by life-changing events and emotional upheaval. Walker’s much buzzed-about novel captures all this with eerie precision. “I often had the feeling in those days that I was being watched,” Julia says in the book, “but I think the sensation was a product of the exact opposite conditions.”

Walker credits the authenticity of Julia’s voice to “the emotional memory” of her teenage years. “It’s just an age that I remember well,” she says. “It’s when you first start noticing things in the adult world, and so much is changing. It’s visceral.”

“Everything in the book is invented,” she adds. “None of it happened to me—but I do remember the feeling. As you grow up, certain friends drift away, and there’s your first love, your first interest.”

To make the science of the book feel equally authentic, Walker says, she had to maintain a balance between imagination and hard facts.

“I did some research but it needed to also come from my imagination,” she says. “So it was a combination of my imagination and real science.”

She filed away details from newspaper articles that were tangentially related to her story—things like how the earth’s magnetic field works, how to grow crops in greenhouses, the effects of radiation. Once she had a completed draft, she summoned the courage to show it to an astrophysicist to make sure nothing she’d written was glaringly implausible. “That was scary,” she says, laughing. “I was relieved by how many of the things I wrote were plausible.”

Her job was made a little easier, she adds, because the story focuses on the lives of the people involved, keeping the science in the background. In fact the science behind what’s happening is often mysterious to the characters; the effects of the slowing only have to be explained to the degree that a very bright, observant 11-year-old narrator would be able to grasp.

Julia is a sharp and funny character, and the story has its share of humor and light. But it’s also a grim look at high-speed ecological disaster, and could easily be read as a warning about the importance of treasuring the planet. Walker says she herself is no doomsayer. But, she adds, “I am drawn to stories that have some sort of threat or danger; it has a way of raising the stakes.”

Walker, who wrote the novel while working as an editor at Simon & Schuster, has since quit her job to focus on writing, something she’d never imagined she would have the opportunity to do. “I didn’t realize how tempting it would be,” she says. “It’s been really unexpected, amazing, but also hard to process.”

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a coming-of-age story that may be one of the best books of the year. In it, 14-year-old June grieves after her Uncle Finn dies of AIDS. In BookPage, Stephenie Harrison writes, “The narrative is as tender and raw as an exposed nerve, pulsing with the sharpest agonies and ecstasies of the human condition.”

Debut author Carol Rifka Brunt explains why an emotional connection with readers is so important.

What was the inspiration for Tell the Wolves I’m Home? I know you worked on the novel over the course of several years. Did the characters, plot or setting come first?
For me, stories always start with the language, the voice. Until I can hear the voice, I’m lost. I can start to write, but the words feel flat. The first line: “My sister Greta and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that afternoon because he knew he was dying” is pretty much the first line of Tell the Wolves I’m Home I wrote. Over three and a half years, this line stayed the same.

Before that I just had an idea of an uncle painting a final portrait of his niece. I was working on a few short stories at the time and this scenario just came to me one day. I didn’t know what he was dying of or what the relationship between the two was like. I just knew that he was making the painting as a last ditch attempt at leaving something in the world, forging a final relationship that would outlast him. Once I had June’s voice I could start to feel my way into the story.

Much later—like maybe two years into the process—I realized that part of the inspiration for the AIDS aspect of the story very likely came from an experience surrounding my eighth grade English teacher. He was an exchange teacher from England, very well-liked. He left to return to London at the end of the year and a few months later we heard that he’d died. He was only in his 30s, so this was really shocking. Not long after that we heard that he’d had AIDS. With all the confusion and fear around AIDS at that time, this seemed almost unreal. It was the first time AIDS had entered our lives and it made a big impression. It feels strange that I didn’t see the connection between that teacher and this story. My physical descriptions of Toby in Tell the Wolves could just as easily be descriptions of that teacher. So similar. And yet I didn’t even notice.

My book about a friendship between a teenager and a man dying of AIDS was getting attention from multiple editors at big houses? Not what I was expecting at all.

What was your reaction when you found out your first novel would be published?
Stunned? Elated? I was actually on a writers retreat in a big old country house in rural England with a group of people I’d never met when it all started happening. My agent had submitted the novel on a Friday and by Monday we had a couple editors interested.  My book about a friendship between a teenager and a man dying of AIDS was getting attention from multiple editors at big houses? Not what I was expecting at all.  I sequestered the library and spoke to editor after editor about the book. That alone was an amazing experience. Just hearing editorial ideas, having people who seemed passionate about my work, was wonderful.

An auction was scheduled and I actually left the retreat for a day so I could deal with whatever was about to happen. I was home alone when I heard that we had sold to Dial Press (Random House) and I remember just jumping up and down in my kitchen like a maniac. After three and a half years of writing and revising, five months of submitting to agents with a collection of about 50 agent rejections over that time, I just couldn’t quite believe it was all really happening.

Your main character, June, is 14 when the novel begins. Can you describe your life at that age? Did anything significant happen to you then that led you to write June as a teenager?
You know, I really tried to avoid falling into the “autobiographical first novel” trap. I would have loved for this story not to have been set in Westchester in the late '80s where I grew up, but that setting just worked so well for the story. I seem to have a very clear memory of my 14-year-old mindset. Maybe too clear! I gave June a lot of the geeky preoccupations I had at her age—a romantic notion of the Middle Ages, a collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books, a love of escapist period movies—and also maybe the sense of trying to figure out my place in the world. Like June, I remember a strong sense of viewing things from the outside, of not really being part of things that were going on around me, of feeling like a watcher rather than a participant.

Having said all that, the story itself isn’t autobiographical at all. There was no charismatic uncle in the city and the relationship between June and Greta is very different from my relationship with my own sister. Even June’s parents are nothing like my own.

For June, the Middle Ages are her happy place—where she imagines herself when she wants comfort. Do you have something that gives you the same kind of solace in your imagination?
I think looking to another place or time to give you happiness is really the wrong way to go about it. I think it’s something that’s appealing when the here and now isn’t a particularly fulfilling place or when you can’t really see where you fit in the world. In Tell the Wolves there’s June with her feeling that she would be more at home in an earlier time and the quite nerdy Ben who is immersed in Dungeons & Dragons. Both of those pursuits seem to speak to a desire to reinvent oneself as more important or more powerful somehow. So, to answer the question, at this point in my life I don’t really look to escape as a way to feel comfortable. I try to live my real life in a way that gives me the things I need.

On the other hand, maybe writing is the most escapist pursuit of all. Hour after hour spent dreaming up other places and lives. Maybe that’s my way of removing myself.

How do you make emotions feel so real on the page?
I think writing in first person is a big help with really getting into the emotions of your characters. Writing first person is almost like being an actor. You’re directly voicing somebody else. I think I was often feeling what June was feeling when I was writing.

Also, like so much in novel writing, emotion is tied in closely with other elements. Robert Olen Butler, in his book From Where You Dream, talks about the importance of the sense of yearning in a work. Once you have an understanding of what your character yearns for, her deepest longing (and this might be something she’s not even aware she wants), I think you immediately set up a situation where anything affecting that has a certain power. From page one the reader can see how much June loves her Uncle Finn. She loses him quite early in the book, but he’s still there on every page. You feel her winning him and losing him again and again over the course of the book. I think that the evocation of emotion isn’t about the poignant events, but about that character with that particular yearning encountering those events. The job of the writer is to frontload the situation.

One final thing about this: I figured out at some point in the writing that the emotional arc of the story and even of each scene was as important, if not more important, than the arc of the plot. The event happens and then the emotional response to that is where the story really lies. The whole story is in the reaction. If you shortchange the reader of the character’s full reaction to an event you lose the emotional pull of the story.

Did you have to do any research in preparing to write this novel?
I did quite a bit of reading around AIDS—the timeline for availability of blood tests and AZT and the attitudes and atmosphere of the time—but I also relied a lot on my own memories of the late '80s. Since the book is narrated by a 14-year-old, I had the luxury of not including things she wouldn’t have known.

I had a look at Ryan White’s autobiography, which contained a few helpful nuggets. I also looked around for essays written at the time and came across John Weir’s piece “AIDS Stories,” which appeared in Harper’s close to the time the book is set. Weir writes about running a writing workshop for men with/dying from AIDS. That essay really gave me a window on the feeling of helplessness that many people must have felt around that time.

As a writer, do you have a personal mission statement or purpose?
I’ve been reading a lot of truly excellent narrative nonfiction over the last few years. While writing Wolves I found myself wondering what the novel could bring to the table that nonfiction couldn’t. I’ll admit that it was a hard question to answer. The nonfiction I’d been reading—and none of it was memoir, but rather general narrative nonfiction—was gripping and filled with compelling characters, plus it had the added bonus of revealing something of the real world. So if there were all these amazing true stories, what was the point of writing about invented characters and situations?

After much thought, I concluded that the gift of the novel lies in the emotional connection it can provide. A novel has the ability to put the reader right inside a character, to let the reader understand the way another person thinks and feels. So, that’s my mission as a novelist—to use the novel to emotionally connect with readers. If I want to make an intellectual argument or explore an issue or examine something political, I’d do it through nonfiction. Story and connection are the only goals I have for novel writing.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on several short stories and the beginnings of a new novel at the moment. I would love to talk about the new novel idea, but I have an irrational fear of jinxing it if I reveal anything too soon. Plus, I have only a small amount of faith that I’ll be able to pull off what I’d like to do.

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Read a review of Tell the Wolves I'm Home.

One of the spring's most buzzed-about debuts, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is the story of Robert Chatham, who was just 8 when the 1927 Mississippi flood destroyed his home and his family. As Robert wanders the Delta, in search of his kin and trying to outrun bad luck, Cheng creates a truly American story that mingles myth, music and a little bit of magic.

Writers are often admonished to write what they know, but you did the opposite with Southern Cross the Dog. You're a Chinese American from New York City; your characters are black and white Southerners from rural Mississippi. Why did you decide to set a novel in the South?

You have to write toward your interests. For me that was the Mississippi Delta of the great country blues singers. When I was a teenager I listened a lot to blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt. There was something about that music—the frustration, the melancholy, the resignation but also this great joy—that resonated with me. When it came time to write my first novel, I knew I wanted it to pay tribute to that world.

What kind of research did you do to help you establish the place and the characters' vernacular?

As a reader, the expectation I have for fiction is that the story be credible without it being obliged to hew too closely to fact. That’s where the real joy is in telling stories—asserting a reality that doesn’t exist and blurring the boundaries between what we believe and what is actual. For me, the research is a means of communing with the novel, fleshing out its contours and seeing what images the brain is pulled towards.

The more I read, the more tools I have. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Chandler or Shakespeare or Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

Everything short of boarding a plane, I did—I went to the library; pulled old photos out of digital collections; summoned up land masses on Google Maps; read books by folklorists and ethnomusicologists (notably Alan Lomax and John Work); listened to records; perused the radio archive at the Paley Center for Media in New York City; photocopied pages on dynamiting out of an old handbook; read Honeyboy Edwards’s memoir The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing; watched PBS; pulled up clips on YouTube of Mississippi John Hurt on Pete Seeger’s 1965 series Rainbow Quest; watched flood footage recorded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, listened to a recording of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson talk about life during Jim Crow (“You didn’t say, ‘Give me a can of Prince Albert [Tobacco].’ Not with that white man on that can. You say, ‘Give me a can of that Mister Prince Albert.’”)

Most of that, however, never made it into the book. 

"Southern cross the Dog" is a colloquial term for the geographical point at which two railways intersect. Will you tell us more about the title and its significance?

Literally, there are two railroad lines that used to intersect in Moorehead, Mississippi—the U.S. Southern and the Y.D. or Yazoo-Delta line (colloquially referred to as the Yellow Dog). Apocryphally, the composer W.C. Handy first heard the phrase “Southern cross the Dog” at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. According to Handy’s account, he heard a black itinerant musician playing slide guitar and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” The phrase was later adopted in his song, "The Yellow Dog Rag."

That’s really it as far as fact-based accounts go. But for me “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog” calls to mind something mythical—a place of peace and rest and final judgment. A coming home. A Beulah land.

The title also evokes other parts of blues folklore. There are the crossroads where souls are bargained for; there is the idea of being crossed or jinxed through hoodoo magic; there is the notion of dogs, particularly black dogs, as agents of the devil. This imagery shows up a lot, for instance, in the songs of Robert Johnson. It’s exotic and sexy and while there are definitely elements of those things in the book, the way I really think about the title today is that it is simply the story of a boy trying to come home.

The novel focuses on several different characters, and the story is mostly told in third person. But in two chapters, those focused on Dora and Ellis, you switch to first person. Why did you decide to switch between characters throughout the story, and how did you establish whose tales you would tell from the first-person perspective?

There are portions of this book that could only be told from the point-of-view of those characters. If I’d done otherwise, I would’ve been shirking my responsibility to those characters. From the beginning, I knew that Dora’s character would be the hardest for me to write. To render her convincingly I’d have to cross the divides of gender, race, as well as a history of abuse of which I have no first-hand experience. It was a challenge that I think tests the very core of who I believe myself to be as a writer. These are not easy things to write about, but I didn’t come here to write an easy book.

If I told Dora’s or Ellis’ story from the distance of the third-person, the book would be safer, certainly but that’s not what I think fiction should be. My characters—especially Dora and Ellis—experience a tremendous amount of loss. I owe it to them and the reader to try to understand and communicate that loss.

As a first-time author, what writers inspire you?

Depending on what I’m working on and how I’m conceiving it at the time, I’ll draw on different sources for my inspiration. For Southern Cross the Dog, I know Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country was hugely influential to me. It has the kind of scope and breadth that I wanted for my own book. There’s also Illywhacker by Peter Carey, which reminded me that books should also be thrilling and joyful and provocative to the imagination.

But when I’m working I try not to limit myself to any one kind of writing. Every book provides its own unique insight on structure, or syntax, or plotting or character development. The more I read, the more tools I have to fix the problems that might arise down the road. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Raymond Chandler or William Shakespeare or Bruce Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

I will say, however, that a lot of how I think about fiction is informed by the novelist Colum McCann. I had the luck to study with him for my MFA. He really instilled in me this idea that when you write, you have to be unafraid. Every word you set down should be part of an ambitious undertaking—otherwise what would be the point?

I've read that you haven't visited the South, but your book tour includes stops in several Southern cities, so that's about to change. Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to seeing or visiting in the region in which your novel is set?

I’m not sure I’ll have much time to take in the sights, but there are a few things I’d definitely like to do. For instance, I’d like to spend an evening at a functioning jukejoint and listen to some live blues. I got married last year and my friends took me out to this tiny blues club for my bachelor party. They said the whole night I was like a puppy, looking up at the stage. It was like Christmas morning for me.

If I can, I’d also like to make it out to the Panther Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Yazoo City—see how much of that I got right, how much I got wrong. My wife is also an avid bird-watcher so I think that’ll be something we’ll both enjoy.

What are you working on next?

A novel. At least I think it wants to be a novel. I can say that it’s not set in the American South and that it’s not about me—except in the way that every book is always about the author. With Southern Cross the Dog, the ambition was to make a book that was wide in scope. My inclination now is to go the other way. Something quieter and introspective, but no less ambitious.

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Read our review of Southern Cross the Dog.

Just how long did it take for debut novelist (and former journalist) Adelle Waldman to write her first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.? “To be honest,” she says, speaking on the phone from her home in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, “this isn’t my first novel.”

About eight years ago, Waldman was freelancing in New York City while working on her actual first novel. "Except the thing that didn’t get done was actually writing it," she laughs. "I started to ask myself, ‘am I just an SAT tutor with a Word document on my computer?’ ”

When she turned 29, Waldman decided to move back to her parents' house in Baltimore for six months and finish the book. "I was just amazed that it had happened: I had made something with a beginning, middle and an end. I was so euphoric that I wasn’t able to properly assess its quality. I sent it out to agents but it didn’t have the reception that I had hoped for.”

Devastated, Waldman returned to freelancing until her then-boyfriend (now husband) told her to stop being sad and do something about it. So she picked up on an old idea and, three years later, completed The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. The story of the relationships of up-and-coming literary star Nathaniel (Nate) Piven, it’s a novel that brilliantly taps into the modern single-white-male psyche.

“It was something I wanted to explore,” Waldman says. “In the world I was setting the book in, there’s a type of guy I wanted Nate to be.” Selfish, narcissistic, vain—those are just a few of the words that could describe Waldman’s very realistic male protagonist.

Realism was a concern of Waldman’s while writing The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a book that to some extent takes the 19th-century novel as its inspiration. Waldman describes her discovery of Eliot March’s Middlemarch at 20 as “life-changing.”

“I wasn’t well-read in the classics at the time. I was reading these contemporary books that were relatable, about a confused but plucky woman trying to fight obstacles in her path,” she says.

"Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with him.”

Enter Middlemarch, a book with the sort of psychological depth that was a revelation for Waldman. “Their motives, their thinking . . . I learned things about myself that weren’t the most flattering or attractive; I would see aspects of these qualities in [Eliot’s] characters.”

Which leads us back to Nate, whose attitudes toward both women and success might have some readers reacting strongly (and even negatively). Nate embodies the modern urban, educated, late 20s/early 30s male, complete with intimacy issues and a constant need for validation. “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was explore the psychology of Nate and make him feel real,” Waldman explains. “I tried to step back from the question of likability. I didn’t know what other people would think of Nate. I’ve gotten such different reactions to him! Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with him.”

And there’s good reason to have such a visceral reaction to Nate. Readers watch him fall in love with, then slowly become disinterested in, his charmingly cool girlfriend, Hannah. There’s no particular reason for the cooling of their relationship. Half the time, Nate gives more weight to how his friends perceive his girlfriend than to his own feelings for her.

In relationships, says Waldman, “there are these unattractive thoughts about status. In order to be realistic, to treat it seriously and analyze it, I had to get at things that are uglier.”

Speaking of feelings people don’t like to admit, we couldn’t help but ask her about one important passage in the book, where characters analyze the virtues of “masculine” versus “feminine” writing. Muses Nate, “the kind of writing he preferred seemed inherently masculine. The writers who impressed him weren't animated by a sense of personal grievance. (They were unlikely to, say write poems called ‘Mommy.’) . . ..[W]hen he read something he admired, something written today—fiction, nonfiction, didn't matter—there was about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.”

Does Waldman know male writers who feel this way?

“Having been in Brooklyn for a while, around this literary world,” she says, “there were these discussions in the air. I wanted to address it plausibly. I felt there were things that [some] men think that they’re not going to admit to women—or in their own books—because it makes them look misogynistic.”

Waldman also reflects on how, as a female author, she doesn’t have the option of disregarding how her writing will be received. “I think about it all the time, because we have to,” she says. “Our writing gets pigeonholed as women’s writing.”

It would be a mistake to pigeonhole this unsentimental look at the tumultuous world of the young and single literary set. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. resounds with brutal honesty. With a daring and original voice, Waldman reveals the inner workings of the “typical” guy in this powerful and intelligent novel.

Megan Fishmann writes from San Francisco.

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Read our review of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

Author Koren Zailckas, whose best-selling memoirs Smashed and Fury chronicled her troubled youth, again taps into her own life experiences—but this time, she’s writing fiction. Her debut novel, Mother, Mother, is the story of the Hurst family, whose perceptions of themselves have been twisted by the machinations of their narcissistic and overbearing matriarch, Josephine. We caught up with Zailckas to ask her a few questions about her debut.

Did you find it more difficult writing your first memoir (Smashed) or your first novel? How did the processes differ?

Smashed was probably the more difficult of the two. Before Smashed, I had only written poetry and interoffice memos, so I had absolutely no concept of pacing. All I had was youthful enthusiasm and the kind of poor boundaries that lead a person to overshare. I wrote the first draft in four months and it was at least twice as long as it was supposed to be. My editor really had to help me crack it open and find the book encased within this crazy word count. I guess you could say in Smashed, bingeing was both the subject and the process. I wrote it the same way I used to drink: with no sense of moderation.

By comparison, Mother, Mother was an exercise in restraint. Structurally, I was aiming for something that was a bit like Rebecca—one of those books where the sense of unease builds and builds until the moment of clarity (however twisted) feels like a perversely joyous relief.

That said, withholding information has never been part of my writing process. It took me a number of drafts to get the release valve just right—to find that place where the characters revealed their true colors slowly and organically.

I had an aha moment when I realized not all the Hursts could be self-aware because a narcissistic family doesn’t have a realistic self-image. From that point on, the book became more about finding the meeting place between the Hursts’ reality and their delusions of grandeur.

This story is told through the points-of-view of two of the Hurst children, William and Violet. Did you find that you struggled with either sibling’s voice, or did they both come naturally to you?

There were definitely moments when it was easier to tap into Violet than Will, and visa versa. But mostly, I felt like I could relate to them both. To me, Will and Violet represent the two dominant thought processes in the mind of anyone who’s had early life trauma.

Will is a little bit like the amygdala in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s stuck in his childhood fear and he constantly feels like his safety is at risk.

Violet, on the other hand, has more intellectual understanding about why the people around her behave the way they do. But she can also be a little too scholarly and metaphysical about it. Violet is kind of a Buddhist punk, and by the time we meet her, she’s heavy into drugs and Eastern religions. She smokes pot, she meditates, she stands on her head. She’s desperately hunting for a coping mechanism—some jumble of Sanskrit words she can repeat to make all the self-hatred her mom instilled in her go away.

The irony is, each of them needs what the other has. Violet needs to tap into her painful feelings instead of transcending them. And Will needs to stop being ruled by his fear.

You might say that Josephine keeps her family in a perpetual “gaslight” state: anything she did to them, she later vehemently denies, convincing them it was all in their mind. Is this type of behavior common with narcissists?

Totally. Even if you see the method behind a narcissist’s madness—and that’s tricky to begin with, they leave a trail of confusion—it’s nearly impossible to confront them about anything. They’ll say it flat out didn’t happen. Or they’ll question your memory. Or they’ll say you’re the one who’s crazy. They’ll cry and rage. They’ll blame and demonize you, and likely rally as many supporters as they can to do the same. Narcissists are beyond reproach or compromise because they live in denial.

I used to think it was really calculating. But I realized, very recently, that they’re actually speaking their truth. Narcissists can be kind of dissociative. When their perfect image is threatened, they literally blank out and go somewhere else in their minds. One therapist explained it to me by saying, “They’re not thinking that they want to hurt you. They’re not thinking about anything at all.” Their emotional landscape is kind of like the static station on the TV. It’s not evil. It’s just kind of blank.

How much research did you do on Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

For the past three or four years, I tried to read everything I could find about personality disordered parents. There are a few very helpful titles out there.  Karyl McBride’s Will I Ever Be Good Enough? is one. Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother is another. There are also some shocking examples of narcissistic parenting in Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.

NPD is a spectrum disease, meaning some people just have a few narcissistic traits and still others are full-blown malignant personalities. A lot of narcissists you meet are those people who give off the impression that how things look on the outside—the appearance of the family, or the company, or the marriage—are more important than the reality within. They’re also really great gossips. They control the flow of information. They pit people against each other. They choose to surround themselves with people who either bring them attention and status or people they can use as scapegoats for the negative emotions that don’t jive with the perfect image they’re trying to project.

But two things are really at the heart of the condition. One is grandiosity. Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents. With Josephine, you can see that in the way she pretends she’s this groundbreaking educator. The second is lack of empathy. Narcissists are biochemically incapable of putting themselves in other people’s shoes. Jo is pretty shameless in this latter respect. Faced with news of a cancer diagnosis, she sees no problem using it as an opportunity to bash the woman’s vegan lifestyle (Jo’s attitude is: “See, it just goes to show. . . . All those years of tofu and oat groats, all for nothing. I’ve always said that woman needed a steak.”)

In an age where woman are repeatedly told to lean in, and that they can have it all, do you find that mothers—more so than fathers—feel pressure from society to look perfect on the outside (balancing a home, work, family life and relationship) while they may be struggling on the inside?

I’m not sure our society demands perfection from mothers, but I do think it scares the bejesus out of us. It’s constantly trying to convince us that we’re unwittingly inflicting irreversible damage. You see that all the time in TV news headlines: “What are you packing in your children’s lunch that has the hidden potential to kill them? Find out tonight, during Fox at nine.”

Now that I’m a mother myself, I feel that panic. And I see this smothering self-doubt in my female friends with kids. It’s this fear that you’re going to mess your children up by way of not being informed. The Internet has a lot to do with it too. If our parents suffered from lack of parenting resources, we suffer from too many. There’s just so much unqualified, polarized information online and no one really knows what to do with all of it.

"My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy."

Get a group of mothers together, and the number one question you’re apt to hear is: “How concerned should I be?” How concerned should I really be about the arsenic in rice? About BPAs in cans? How concerned should I be that my toddler can’t say 20 words? What about the fact that my baby doesn’t sleep through the night?

The antidote to parental narcissism is entering your child’s world. Noticing them. Talking to them. Acknowledging their full range of emotional expression and letting them clue you in to their own distinct, individual needs. When you’re looking at a computer screen, it’s easy to neglect some of that.

At one point Edie says to Josephine, “Ask any farmer, they’ll tell you some moms just aren’t naturals. Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you f***ing Beethoven.” Do you agree with that statement? Did you worry about your own ability to adapt to motherhood?

Definitely. My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy.

Also, from a really young age (like, I was still playing with dolls) my mother would tell me that I wasn’t maternal. In retrospect, it seems like a strange projection, something she was just working through on her own, but you don’t understand these things when you’re little. As a kid, you simply take it as fact. As a result, I shied away from babies and toddlers for a long time. I sort of felt like the woman in the psychiatric ward during Violet’s stay—the one who has an Edward Scissorhands complex, the one who wants to hold people but fears she’s going to maim them in the process.

It took me a long time (and a lot of therapy) to realize I wasn’t my mother, but at the end of the day, I still felt like I was missing the maternal handbook. The things I remembered my mother doing when I had play dates over were not the things I wanted to do with my own kids’ friends came over. The things I remembered my mother saying when I hurt myself were not the words I wanted to use to comfort my own kids.

But then, I realized I’ve had a lot of other kindness in my life to draw from. I’ve had really maternal teachers, aunts, uncles, second cousins, in-laws, friends. And those people inspire the way I relate to my kids. They’ve given me a lot of love to pass on. Collectively, they’ve taught me a lot about mothering.

You are very open about your difficulties with your mother. Were you worried that writing a book about an abusive mother figure would worsen your relationship?

It’s been about a year since I spoke to my mother. I wish her well, and I understand the way her upbringing gives her certain emotional limitations, at least in the way she relates to me. This isn’t one of those situations where I stopped talking to her because I didn’t get enough hugs as a kid. It was more like the present issues had become far too disruptive.

Hopefully, if she reads Mother, Mother she will recognize it’s fiction—a way to deal with real feelings by way of a fictionalized family and an imagined scenario. Somehow I doubt she’ll see it that way, but it’s the truth. Life is full of thorns, and I’m just trying the very best I can to tend my own garden. Writing is a survival mechanism for me. I can’t not do it. It’s the only way I know to make sense and meaning out of difficult things.

How much of your past addiction history—i.e. the need/desire to escape through drugs or alcohol—did you draw from when creating Violet’s character?

Well, drinking was my drug of choice. Violet is more into drugs, but I still drew quite a bit from my own addiction history. It’s taken me 10 years, but I see now what I couldn’t when I wrote Smashed: my home life was so painful, binge drinking was an attempt to kill myself in a way that seemed accidental and, even, socially acceptable (at least for a teenager or college student).

Violet’s drug use, in part, is about numbing out. No one in her family cares what she’s feeling—in fact, any expression of emotion gets her into trouble—so why should she acknowledge her despair, even to herself?

There’s also another reason Violet turns to drugs (and this is the truly sick one): on some subconscious level, she’s really trying to appease her unappeasable mom. Josephine is angry, she’s sick, she’s out of control. But being kind of emotionally stunted, Jo needs Violet around to act out those feelings for her.

Jo has left Violet with little choice except to be the “bad” Hurst. If, say, Violet swung the other way and tried to be an honor student, Jo would swoop in and take all the credit. If Violet went out for school sports, her mother would mock her. If she put more effort into the way she looked, her mother would accuse her of putting on airs. The Hursts need Violet to be a slacker and a problem. Without that low-level distraction, they’d be forced to confront the source of their issues. And no one in the Hurst family feels safe doing that.

What are you working on next?

I’ve got a few other psychological thrillers in the cooker. It’s strange the way imagining scary stories can feel almost healthy. I feel like I’ve had a kind of awakening. In all my years of writing, I’ve never had more fun.